”Now that they’re teaching ’patriotism’ in the schools again, maybe it wasn’t in your history books.” Om historiebruk i skräckserier

Sammanfattning: The research in this paper is focused on examining the use of history in horror comics, particularly the example of manga. The paper focuses on examining how the use of history takes shape in a certain part of popular culture, why the particular historical incidents portrayed may have been chosen and whether the conventions of the horror genre affect the way the story is told. The text examines in particular use of history in the comic The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service by Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki and whether the history brought up in this work can be connected to discourse and currents in the Japanese cultural landscape at the time of publication, although a brief comparison with Hideshi Hino’s Panorama de l’Enfer and Junji Ito’s A Deserter in the House is made. The paper employs Thierry Groensteen’s “system” for comics as a method to analyse them, and Jörn Rüsen’s theories of how facts and norms are conveyed through “stories” claiming to represent history as a theoretical basis, along with a discussion of how horror as a genre reinforces particular doxa when whatever monster is representing evil in a given work is defeated. The paper is divided into themes mainly based around the historical events the works are depicting. Conclusively, this paper finds that the use of history in the works examined does argue for a particular view of history and can in many cases be connected to an ongoing discussion in society at the time of publication. Therefore, the paper argues that more genres than those concerned with the strictly and directly historical need to be examined. Furthermore, it argues that the horror genre can be particularly effective at demonstrating who was on the wrong side of history according to the author of any given work, as the people on the wrong side of history are cast as evil characters, and various doxa are reinforced as they are defeated. However, the use of history in comics or other forms of popular culture has not been sufficiently studied that it is possible to state to what extent these stories are received by the audience as the authors intended, and therefore further research particularly around the reception of historical stories in popular culture are needed.